


Nights So Black They're Blue

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Grief/Mourning, Love in a season of death, M/M, Other characters are mentioned but do not appear - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 00:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10059377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: They're doing very well for a fighting force whose leader's died.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sixappleseeds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixappleseeds/gifts).



> And *blows a kiss to space* for Carrie Fisher.

Finn wakes alone in their bed, sighs, steps outside. Both moons are down and the starlight's dimmed by haze. Poe's leaning against the outer wall. “Company or no company?” Finn asks.

“Company.” 

Finn leans too, so that their shoulders are pressed together, bodies turned outward, facing the sky. 

“If she'd died fighting,” Poe says after a while. “In an attack, a rescue, anything—she would've hated to waste her death like this.”

Finn doesn't say _You might be projecting_. Poe also might be right. He knew the General as well as anyone. He fought for her a long time. 

*

They're doing very well for a fighting force whose leader's died. The squadrons rise and wheel and sink and rise again, like moons. “She'd be proud of us,” Poe says, the first day everybody's home. They look at him strangely. They look at each other. 

The briefing lets out with drills scheduled before sunrise. Poe tells BB-8 to wake him at 0330. He lies down next to Finn, but he's still awake when the subsonics tickle his middle ear. The sky is a color he's never seen anywhere but here, a blue that seems it can't hold any more blue. 

 

*

Finn snaps the audio playback off, his jaw set. Poe waits. 

“I hate it,” Finn says finally. “I hate it that they talk about her, but not Simon and Tipul and Chirandamala.” Two infantrymen and a covert operative, six days ago. In the Resistance, you mourn when there's a pause in fighting, and there hasn't been one. It's a carefully judged show of strength that Finn and his team launched as soon as General Organa's death became public knowledge. But for her, they had a funeral. People all over the galaxy mourn her. The speeches are still rolling in. 

*

The Force isn't a place, and it isn't a feeling. It's like how Rey describes the ocean, a constant flow and muscle and shift studded with lives. Finn feels the living come and go. One veers close, floods his awareness with warmth, waits for him to return in his own time to ordinary awareness before saying, “Anything?”

“No, I can't feel her. I thought—I'm probably just not strong enough yet. I could try again with Rey tomorrow.” 

“You don't have to.”

“I'd like to see her again.”

“Unfinished business,” Poe says. “That's what keeps someone here.”

*

They've redistributed General Organa's responsibilities, which for Finn means strategy briefings that let out at three or four in the morning. Poe waits for him, a low light on, and opens the door to him, and takes off his boots for him. Kisses his inseam: “You need anything?”

“Just to sleep,” Finn says, yawns, “next to you.” Poe thought he knew enough now not to get lonely in the time between those phrases. He should be grateful Finn's alive. He helps Finn off with the rest of his clothes and they settle in together, chest to back for now. 

*

Finn gives up trying to move. Poe's kneeling over him, driving into him, their thighs locked together. Taking it feels good, always does, but he wishes Poe's face—twisting silently now as he comes—weren't so far away.

“Hey,” he says when Poe's stopped moving with his eyes still lost, “I'm right here.” 

Poe's expression resolves into chagrin. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I didn't mean to get like that.” 

“Like what? Lie next to me.” 

Poe kneels up, leaving Finn empty and sore, but at least he lies down in the bend of Finn's arm. “Like I'm trying to win.” 

*

The full briefing's excruciating. The teams that replaced her deliver reports and recommendations. Statura, Akbar; redistribution of resources, coordinated strikes, blockades, and then Finn stands to take his turn. 

He speaks well, but Poe can't bear how the Resistance has healed up around her, as though she'd never been here. How that's what she would have wanted. How she's not here. 

But Finn is here, hand firm on Poe's forearm as the room seems to tighten, holding him—holding them both steady, Poe understands. He accepts the touch and listens to the planning that might keep them all alive another day.

*

They walk back from the landing field, bright moonlight skimming Finn's face and losing itself in his hair. Poe stops him halfway to their quarters with a hand on his waist, and they kiss. The flight suit keeps body heat from crossing between them, but Finn's palm is warm on Poe's cheek, his neck, his temple. Footsteps, laughter, scraping metal, and then the night business of the base quiets around them and it's just their breath and the shuffle of fabric. They kiss, between the void and home, between the dirt path and the arching sky, between nothing and nothing.


End file.
